The Documents page on the eSpeak website [http://espeak.sourceforge.net/docindex.html here] provides an excellent guide for using different voices, adjusting pronunciation, etc. There are many different accents included in this install that are worth trying out.

The Documents page on the eSpeak website [http://espeak.sourceforge.net/docindex.html here] provides an excellent guide for using different voices, adjusting pronunciation, etc. There are many different accents included in this install that are worth trying out.

Revision as of 17:21, 8 February 2012

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Speech recognition is any means by which you can interface with your computer via spoken word. This page is designed to identify applications that can facilitate speech recognition and to serve as a guide in installing and using this software in Arch.

A note to newcomers: Speech recognition is something that has traditionally not been well supported in Linux. If you become interested and choose to dig below the immediate surface, you can expect difficulty in finding documentation or help from the community.

Types of Speech Recognition

Speech recognition can mean several things:

Text-To-Speech:

As it sounds, Text-To-Speech (or TTS) will manipulate a string of text into an audio clip. There are several programs available that perform TTS, some of which are command-line based (ideal for scripting) and others which provide a handy GUI.

Simple Voice Control/Commands:

This is the most basic form of Speech-To-Text application. These are designed to recognize a small number of specific, typically one-word commands and then perform an action. This is often used as an alternative to an application launcher, allowing the user for instance to say the word “firefox” and have his OS open a new browser window.

Full dictation/recognition:

Full dictation/recognition software allows the user to read full sentences or paragraphs and translates that data into text on the fly. This could be used, for instance, to dictate an entire letter into the window of an email client. By far the most difficult aspect of speech recognition and this sort of software is not as easy/readily-available in linux. In some cases, these types of applications need to be trained to your voice - several even improve in accuracy the more you use them.

Development Status

Several years ago there was a push to implement speech recognition in Linux. Since then, many of those projects have stagnated.

Text-To-Speech

The two major players in text-to-speech applications are Festival and eSpeak. Comparison available here

Festival

Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, from Java, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and American), and Spanish) though English is the most advanced.

eSpeak

eSpeak is "a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows".

Open source

Lightweight

Available in the community repository

Excellent language support

Installing eSpeak

To install eSpeak:

pacman -S espeak

Testing eSpeak

echo "Hello. This is a test." | espeak

eSpeak Usage/Configuration

The Documents page on the eSpeak website here provides an excellent guide for using different voices, adjusting pronunciation, etc. There are many different accents included in this install that are worth trying out.

Voice control to open user specified applications. For example, if you say "Web", the Perlbox-Voice Control will open the browser of your choice.

Desktop plugins to control your Linux desktop using only your voice. You can switch virtual screens, cycle through desktops, invoke the run dialog, quick lock the screen.

Custom commands are fully supported, and you can add commands on the fly.

Pseudo Commands' allow you to enter commands that the speaker should say. For example, if you say "Good morning", the computer voice could say "And good morning to you".

Speech Recognition

Free Speech Recognition Engines

CMU Sphinx

Simon

Julius

XVoice

ViaVoice

sphinxkeys

VoxForge

Proprietary Speech Recognition Engines

Dragon Naturally Speaking in Wine

Dragon Naturally Speaking software by Nuance is an extremly well-functioning and popular implementation of speech dictation. It is developed for Windows, but has been run sucsessfully in a a linux enviornment using wine. It can be used independantly for dictation into other wine programs such as notepad or it can be paired with Platypus to interface with any native linux program. Platypus also provides a feature to control of your OS using voice commands, similar to the programs described in the Voiced Commands section.

Nuance's software is non-free, so you will have to purchase a copy. Note that Dragon provides you with the ability to install it on a set number of machines. Installing/Reinstalling in wine may use up some of these licenses.